Editorial: Delinquent Congress resets doomsday clock

3:11 PM, January 2, 2013

House Speaker John Boehner Ohio walks to his office on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday as legislation to negate a fiscal cliff of across-the-board tax increases and sweeping spending cuts moved to the GOP-dominated House following a bipartisan, middle-of-the-night approval in the Senate. / J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP Photo

In the formulaic climax to a thousand or so action movies we've seen, the hero bursts into the control room and defuses a ticking time bomb seconds before it's scheduled to detonate.

The New Year's Night finale to America's fiscal cliff drama was sort of like that -- except that the deadline turned out to be phony, the heroes had to be forced into the control room at gunpoint, and instead of defusing the bomb they opted to reset the timer.

Still, it made for thrilling TV, and we suppose the 11 members of Michigan's congressional delegation who collaborated to push the reset button deserve our thanks.

Hats off, too, to Reps. Bill Huizenga (R-Zeeland), Justin Amash (R-Cascade Twp.) and Tim Wahlberg, (R-Tipton), who voted against the bipartisan compromise; their intransigence reminds voters how inconsequential the antics of a few grandstanding ideologues can be when a majority of their congressional colleagues agree to behave responsibly.

By any reasonable standard, of course, the New Year's Eve compromise brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky.) falls well short of responsible. The deal endorsed by Congress includes no spending cuts, eschews even the lowest-hanging fruit of entitlement reform, and secures only a little more revenue from only the wealthiest sliver of Americans. Most ominously, the deal assures that America's public debt, which already accounts for nearly three-quarters of the nation's gross domestic product, will continue to grow faster than the economy that undergirds it.

To alter that unsustainable trajectory, the new Congress must waste no time in confronting the challenges its predecessor shrank from: tax reform that generates new revenue without choking off long-term growth; benefit cuts that place Medicare and Social Security on a path to long-term solvency; and significant reductions in military spending. The two parties may be far from agreeing how to apportion the burden of paying down the deficit, but only proposals that demand big contributions from all three sectors deserve serious consideration.

President Obama says negotiations over these uber-issues should not be held hostage to an agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling. He argues, not unreasonably, that refusing to honor the debts Congress has already incurred would do nothing to bolster the nation's solvency.

But it makes little difference to most Americans whether the thing that forces Congress to behave responsibly is the prospect of automatic budget cuts, the threat of a government shutdown, or the specter of outright default. What matters it that our elected representatives in Washington stop dithering and start negotiating in earnest over an agreement to bring deficit spending under control.

This is no time for self-congratulation; the bomb has not been defused, and the clock is ticking louder than ever.